Worth its weight in gold or yet another resource - A comparative study of Wiktionary, OpenThesaurus and GermaNet

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the topology and the content of a range of lexical semantic resources for the German language constructed either in a controlled (GermaNet), semi-controlled (OpenThesaurus), or collaborative, i.e. community-based, manner (Wiktionary). For the first time, the comparison of the corresponding resources is performed at the word sense level. For this purpose, the word senses of terms are automatically disambiguated in Wiktionary and the content of all resources is converted to a uniform representation. We show that the resources' topology is well comparable as they share the small world property and contain a comparable number of entries, although differences in their connectivity exist. Our study of content related properties reveals that the German Wiktionary has a different distribution of word senses and contains more polysemous entries than both other resources. We identify that each resource contains the highest number of a particular type of semantic relation. We finally increase the number of relations in Wiktionary by considering symmetric and inverse relations that have been found to be usually absent in this resource. © Springer-Verlag 2010.